In many industries it is important to keep accurate time logs of employee arrivals, departures, lunch times, breaktimes and the like. In a factory environment with a single location and a small number of accesses, this information has traditionally been collected by means of a mechanical time clock and paper punch cards for each employee.
But such a system is impractical in many cases, particularly where employees may be in many different job-sites and may change their locations throughout the day. For example, a construction employee may be required to work at one job-site in the morning and another job-site in the afternoon. As well, the same employee may have to pick up materials at a supplier's location, drop the materials off at a third job-site, and visit the employer's office through the course of the same day. It is necessary to monitor the time that such an employee spends performing different tasks so customers can be billed properly, and so that the employer can run his operation efficiently. But the more complex the employment scenario, the more difficult it is to monitor time and employee performance.
Clearly, time-monitoring systems which rely on physical components at each job-site can be very difficult or impossible to manage. Electronic systems such as the Exak-Time™ system, which uses an electronic check-in fob or “puck” at each job-site, become very cumbersome when employees are active in many locations. And of course, such systems are not effective at all when the employees are traveling from one location to another, or are visiting locations in which check-in fobs or pucks have not been previously installed.
Many other time management systems have been proposed, but there are problems inherent in their approaches, such as the following:                lack of simplicity;        lack of motivation for workers/employees to report regularly and accurately;        they are limited in application because they rely on an additional layer of management, i.e. that of a trusted onsite foreman or supervisor who must punch in each worker/employee;        they often require dedicated punch-in devices which can be expensive, are inconvenient to deploy, and may be impractical to deploy in all locations that employees may visit;        systems which incorporate generic input devices such as Smartphones, typically require software to be installed by the employer, with the Smartphone physically local and connected to the employer's computer system;        many systems only provide very limited reports with little useful information;        typically, other systems are implemented as “policing”-type systems where it is clear to the employees that the system is being used only to their detriment. This is poor for employee morale, and employees tend not to report regularly and accurately; and        they are vulnerable to abuses such as “buddy punching”. For example, some systems allow multiple employees to leave their monitoring devices with a single employee at the job site, so that he can punch all of the employees in, while they are elsewhere.        
Thus, although there are other approaches existing in the field, none of them has found wide acceptance in the marketplace due to their management orientation, complexity, limitations and non-intuitive nature. These approaches are unlikely to be used by workers/employees on a continuing basis.
There is therefore a need for an improved system which allows for simple, yet effective, time management and productivity reporting, which addresses at least some of the problems of the existing approaches.